Official Wrestling, August 1951 / Mike Mazurki

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Official Wrestling v01n04 (1951-08)(D vs M).cbr
Get the full scan here!

OK, mat fans, you've persistently asked for more posts on the golden age of wrestling, so I'll get right to posting a handful of mags between now and Christmas. I don't really have any coherent theme I mean to follow, so we'll just see what happens as I thumb through the scans McCoy and I have prepared for all you wrestling fans out there. Tonight's classic issue is the August 1951 edition of Official Wrestling, a most excellent publication that would soon become N.W.A. Official Wrestling. I picked this issue up because I just can't resist a good catfight cover. Pictured is Mae Weston who has fiery redhead Carol Cook in an "Adam's Apple" hold as referee and boxing legend Jack Dempsey tries in vain to keep the fight fair.

Dempsey's wildly successful career began in the 1910s on small circuits and with Dempsey challenging all takers for the purse in ballroom brawls and would extend into the twenties as Dempsey participated in some of the biggest, most famous, and most well-promoted (not to mention well-paying) matches in boxing History. His last two matches would be against Gene Tunney, who was, as luck would have it, the Chairman of the Board and lead Editorial writer for this very magazine. Their last match, the infamous "Long Count" fight, would be Dempsey's last bout (wiki for Dempsey here and wiki for Tunney here). Dempsey had an involvement in pulp magazines right after his retirement as well as with at least one slick magazine in the 40s, was a successful restauranteur, and penned a couple of books on self-defense, How to Fight Tough, a paperback from Hillman in 1942, and Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense from 1951 which purportedly would influence later fighting books from the likes of Edwin Haislet and Bruce Lee. And I can't help but add on the topic of my previous few posts that during World War II Dempsey was of great service to our country. He was a huge fundraiser in the bond drives, and he would help prepare physical fitness programs for our armed services. Amazingly, as a 49 year old, he would even see active duty. In 1945, he was on the Attack Transport Arthur Middleton at Okinawa. Roger Kahn writes in his 1999 biography of Dempsey, A Flame of Pure Fire:

One of Dempsey's units was assigned to move in with the landing parties storming Okinawa. As the young warriors climbed into small boats for the assault on April 1, 1945, a line officer said, "You stay here with me, Jack, we can't afford to lose you."

Dempsey said, "Sir, I trained these boys and they look up to me. I go where they go." Which is how Jack Dempsey hit the beach at Okinawa when he was forty-nine years old.

"You know," he told me with great seriousness, "in World War I, they said I was a slacker. In World War II they said I was a hero." A hard look. "They were wrong both times."

Dempsey had purportedly been deemed unfit during WWI and received all sorts of slanders for it, so he felt his service in WWII was a sort of vindication.

Dempsey was interested in all forms of hand-to-hand combat, and it's not surprising he would show up as a referee during this immensely popular time for wrestling (the inside front cover points to the popularity of wrestling in that WOR-TV in New York was broadcasting the sport a whopping three evenings a week during prime time, astounding!). Dempsey weighs in on the topic of female referees in the lead article, “Dempsey Thumbs Down on Women Referees” written by Lou Thesz. I’ll go ahead and post the whole article. In this new phenomenon of women’s wrestling, which was accepted with some skepticism by male wrestlers and society at large (the article points out there were states where it was illegal, including NY, though it seemed to take off pretty well), Dempsey and Thesz argue that women would have no respect for women refs. I think it’s fairly ironic that, in the photo shoot, the ladies don’t really seem to pay much heed to Dempsey in the role of ref either.


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By the end of the article, Thesz is pretty much ready to admit that ladies’ wrestling is here to stay with all its broad appeal. Further insight into the emerging women’s wrestling scene is given by Marj Heyduck in a truly charming article by this female reporter who the byline claims is the “country’s only woman wrestling editor”. I’ll put up the entire article of this one also because I like it so much. Marj writes well, and I simply adore her description of taking a girls group of wrestlers out to a society club in New York and how the girls begin to wolf down appetizers, main courses, and multiple deserts as the upper crust looks on in astonishment. There’s something entirely sexy about a woman that knows how to eat a proper meal.


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Great stuff. Here’s also a larger cutout of the Maurice Tillet picture.



I posted a page with Tillet back on my post of The Wrestling Scene from 1950 because of his unique mug and fascinating story. I recently found a great thread on Tillet with many more pictures that makes a convincing comparison of Tillet to Shrek (who my kids are crazy for). Check it out here.

I’ll highlight one more article, “Mat or Movie: He’s Moider”, on grappler and movie star Mike Mazurki. Born Mikhail Mazurkhevych in the west of the Ukraine, Mazurki would come to America and find success both on the mat and on the screen. The article:


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Film Noir fans will recognize a few of the movies mentioned as classics. His role as the tough softie Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet (1945) (tied for my favorite Chandler adaptation with The Big Sleep) is unforgettable, and he has a part as a strongman in another noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947). Comix fans should check out Spain Rodriguez’ adaptation of the William Lindsay Gresham novel that the novel is based on (screenplay by the great Jules Furthman). Of course, mat fans will take the most interest in Mazurki’s turn in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), perhaps the greatest wrestling movie ever made. A friend recommended it to me a couple of years ago, and besides being a great film in its own right, it features two great wrestlers, Mazurki and Stanislaus Zbyszko (who like Tillet was a multilingual man of culture - though when Dassin tracked him down for the part, so many years after his fame, he was farming chickens in New Jersey). I’ll wait and blog on Zbyszko some other time (hopefully I can find some pub from the earlier part of the century that will inspire me), but in the meantime check out his utterly fascinating wiki here. I’ll go ahead and embed the Mazurki vs. Zbyszko scene from the film from youtube here, but, please, if you have any desire to see the original movie whatsoever skip this and view it in its proper context. Their match takes on a deeper meaning in the movie as part of the drama and as a conflict between older and newer wrestling styles and is best appreciated as part of the larger film. Still, against my better judgment, I’ll include it here (and cross my fingers that I can figure out how to embed):




A fantastic scene, a fantastic film, seeing it now makes me want to watch the movie again.

I find it remarkable that the article on Mazurki notes that he had wrestled some 1500 bouts in the twelve years prior to publication. Mazurki’s IMDB page shows how busy he was in Hollywood in the 40s after he was discovered by the great Josef Von Sternberg in 1941, incredible he had time for all of that! He would go onto a long career in movies and TV and wrestled as long as he could and was a referee even after that. He would also co-found and become the first president of the Cauliflower Alley Club, a fraternal organization of wrestlers that helps share memory of the sport and supports needy wrestlers with scholarships and a helping hand for wrestlers and their families who have been hurt on the job. His own ear is featured in the club logo:




What a guy. Two nice web pages on Mazurki

Mazurki page at Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame

Mazurki page at SLAM! Sports

But on to the rest of the mag. I’m going to post the contents and then I’ll post a bunch of photos. I discovered the stats tab here on blogger the other day and was completely and absolutely dumbfounded at how many hits I am getting. Thank you, readers. I had no idea there was such interest in the arcane stuff I’m putting up, and I am truly flattered. Anyways, I noticed that a lot of my hits are coming from image searches which reinforces my belief that it is very important that we bloggers get good images (and big images!) out there. It’s often amazing how sad the results are on even the most common of topics when I do an image search, and there’s no reason that it needs to be this way. It’s our internet, people, so let us fill it with the good content and drown out all the spam! Putting up a picture near any text that will identify it makes these searches more fruitful, and I repeat an offer I’ve made before that bloggers are welcome to use whatever images they please from any of the scans here at Darwination Scans they like for any not for profit uses that meet their needs or fancy.

Contents:

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And I’m done blathering on, picture time!! Frank Sexton battles Maurice Tillet and “Red” O’ Malley

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Newcomer from Greece, John Kostas

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The centerfold, Gorgeous George breaks a full nelson, fantastic

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A Lancaster, PA, Fan takes a kick at Tony Sinatra (don’t you love how the fans all came out in their best clothes to see the matches?)

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Big Bill Miller

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Mars Bennet puts an un-ladylike move on Lillian Bitter

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Phil Zimmerman and Pete Gentile in a technical article on holds

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Tom Jenkins, old-tyme wrestler, held the title for 15 years before losing it in 1905 to George Hackenschmidt

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Rounding out this post, “The Golden Dozen,” the top female wrestlers of the day

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Much more material within, fan letters, etc. What a cool mag!

And, lastly, from the back cover, Blatz Beer??!!?! Who’d drink something called Blatz? Of course, I shouldn’t talk, I probably drank a king’s ransom of Schlitz in a previous life…

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